The imperatives of bread and circus

NASCAR starts up again Sunday at Darlington, albeit Weird NASCAR. There will be no fans, no qualifying, no practice, just get in and go. And all possible precautions will be observed.

Meanwhile, Major League Baseball has floated plans for an 82-game season to begin on the Fourth of July. There will be no fans, and all possible precautions will be observed.

And the NBA?

Well, confidence is now high that the season will resume in "bubbles" in Las Vegas and at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando.  There will be no fans, and all possible precautions, etc., etc.

And so it begins, as COVID-19 cases continue to spike, as the nation's leading experts in contagious diseases warn that a second wave of the virus is a virtual certainty, as the state of California mandates its universities will continue with online instruction in the fall -- a course which inevitably will be followed by other states as summer wears on, jeopardizing college athletic schedules everywhere.

Five'll get you ten the powers-that-be in collegiate athletics will find a way to work it all out. Because, bidness.

It's an old hobby horse, but so much of what we're seeing in America right now evokes the imagery of crumbling Rome. Mad Nero in the White House wallows in old grudges and imaginary conspiracies while the nation burns with fever. The barbarians are not just at the gate but within it, armed insurgents who believe it's their constitutional right to break any law with which they don't agree standing guard over the like-minded.

And as the nation goes to hell in a handcar, the games in the Colosseum must go on. Because we are a society that doesn't just need our bread and circus, we're addicted to it. Our diversions have become so pervasive they are not really diversions anymore. They're our identity.

We are no longer the nation of the Founders, it seems. We are the nation of the Tiger King.

As a big chunk of that, sports have become as sprawling an industry as General Motors and U.S. Steel used to be. So they push to reopen  not simply because the nation "needs" its Sportsball; they push to reopen because those who have gotten unfathomably rich off sports have decided they must continue to get unfathomably rich.

Understand, none of them are really hurting, at least in the way most of us understand it. They're pretty much immune to that. So that's not really the point of putting their high-priced employees at risk -- nor is it really a concern for either them or a nation that wants what it wants when it wants it.

Thus, all possible precautions, yada-yada. Thus, the NBA weighing whether or not a player testing positive for COVID-19, once play resumes, should be enough to shut everything down again.

The prevailing opinion, as expressed by NBA commish Adam Silver?

That if a positive test would shut everything down, "we probably shouldn't go down this path."

In which case it's fair to ask how many positive tests it would take to shut everything down again. Two? Three? Ten? Twenty?

It's a question that says everything about both our times and the nation in which we now live. And nothing good about any of it.